Quote from: Pat;1121153I wasn't really thinking of GURPS with those examples. More the perennial D&D houserules codified in Dragon articles or Torn Asunder, or those very Tolkienesque invisible turtles of MERPS.

This may explain why I'm possibly not grokking your point. My D&D days date back to the veteran AD&D1E ruleset, and we never used any of those houserules, so it doesn't resonate for me the same way. And even when I was playing with GURPS, my game was a Supers game, so I never bothered with maiming criticals because it wasn't part of the atmosphere our group wanted.

If your basic point is that a tiny shift in outcome distribution probability per roll can produce a more significant than expected outcome distribution if applied consistently over a sufficiently long period, I certainly grant that. (This is actually one reason I think a Take 10/Take 20 rule equivalent in GURPS would be a good idea.) I just don't think it's relevant to the point I was making, which is that in practice, players tend to think mostly in terms of the roll right in front of them, so a -1 modifier is going to feel much less significant to a Skill 17 PC than to a Skill 11 PC on a per-roll basis, even if the effects are more accumulatively significant than realized.

(Given that in GURPS, rolls of 17 and 18 are automatic failures regardless of Skill level, in practice no Skill 17+ character will notice any negative modifier until it reduces his effective skill to 15 or below anyway, in terms of basic success odds -- it may be relevant if the roll takes the difference between roll and skill threshold into account, as in Quick Contests, but otherwise you might as well not bother.)

Ultimately I think the basic "problem" with all bell curve randomizer systems is not the small modifiers but the large ones, because they make much less difference at the ends of the range than their flat size implies; a Skill 17 character rolling at -4 reduces his chances by less than 15%, but a Skill 12 character vs. the same penalty reduces his chances by nearly 50%.  I think this is the thing that makes consistent-feeling "Difficulty Tables" harder to build in GURPS than in some other systems, especially for extremely high-powered (Skill 21+) characters, because once the modifiers get much above -4 it's very difficult to estimate the effective results predictably across a party or between opponents of different power levels.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1121205Ultimately I think the basic "problem" with all bell curve randomizer systems is not the small modifiers but the large ones, because they make much less difference at the ends of the range than their flat size implies; a Skill 17 character rolling at -4 reduces his chances by less than 15%, but a Skill 12 character vs. the same penalty reduces his chances by nearly 50%.  I think this is the thing that makes consistent-feeling "Difficulty Tables" harder to build in GURPS than in some other systems, especially for extremely high-powered (Skill 21+) characters, because once the modifiers get much above -4 it's very difficult to estimate the effective results predictably across a party or between opponents of different power levels.

Personally I find this a positive effect of the mechanic, not a negative. It means that high-skill characters can eat a lot of penalties for no real effect, without needing to buy specific exemptions. In contrast there are systems where you need to buy buy specific traits to minimise the effect of poor conditions.

As an example, a competent knife thrower might hit a simple target quite reliably, whilst a master can throw between the legs of a spinning assistant in the circus.

You can do both if you use Techniques.

I've occasionally talked about doing a not-GURPS clone.  Of course it usually deviates from GURPS pretty quickly but here's the things I lean towards.

The Attributes are Strength, Dexterity, Agility, Health, Intelligence, Perception, Willpower, and Charisma.  Agility is Dexterity + Health.  The costs are divided by five.  Skills are bought in blocks of 5 skills which are listed out in the description as adjectives.  I broke out Agility, Perception, and Willpower to allow me to keep the points costs uniform.  Damage would be 2d at Strength 10 and Hit Points would equal Strength + Health to help the system scale down better.  Damage Resistances would be doubled.  Swing and thrust would be reflected in weapon stats and the Damage would be consistently 1d / 5 points.  The idea would be to be very close to fully compatible without being a direct copy.  I'd probably go off the rails on the combat system just because there's no real need to recreate it as long as the stats match up.  I'd have to fight the urge to rethink the entire advantage and disadvantage system.

The Constant so-called 'problem' - people think GURPS needs changes or modifications.

It doesn't, it REALLY doesn't - okay?

If someone is stuck or mired in a D&D mindset  - then they think GURPS needs to be changed.
Maybe your D&D cliches aren't as great as you think they are.

GURPS is Freedom of Choice, D&D is not. Its as simple as that.

- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;1121225The Constant so-called 'problem' - people think GURPS needs changes or modifications.

It doesn't, it REALLY doesn't - okay?

If someone is stuck or mired in a D&D mindset  - then they think GURPS needs to be changed.
Maybe your D&D cliches aren't as great as you think they are.

GURPS is Freedom of Choice, D&D is not. Its as simple as that.

- Ed C.

That is a nice little falsehood you are spouting there. But its still a falsehood.

Quote from: David Johansen;1121082Well,  you can buy +25 to a skill for 100 points.  Totally game legal.  You can even buy +10 to a skill for 40 points which is a little more reasonable.  That makes Joe DX10 have a 20 in rifles.  Give him a 30 aught 6 and he can solve most of the problems you'll ever encounter.

This gets to be a bigger problem in supers games where you've got a thousand points or more to play with.  I really wish they'd gone with the 500 point super bench mark they used to use.  The biggest problem is super strength but you also get into things like the insane stacking of enhanced move x 2 for 20 points.  So x 8 at 100 points, x256  at  200 points.

I'm convinced that the right solution for super strength is x2 for 100 points (lifting Strength would be 30 points / x 2) coupled with limitations and extra effort based on ST not Will.  One cheap way to boost your lifting as it stands is to buy up your Will +20 for 100 points will increase your lifting capacity by 100%.

I don't much like the 4e change to physical skills flattening at 4 points per point. In earlier editions, 40 points in one Average skill would get +6. Combine this with having the GM approve characters generation and improvement so that putting 40 points in a skill represents a very rare accomplishment, and there's no problem.

Your fundamental complaint about the effects of handing out 300+ points and letting players do whatever with them will cause weirdness and balance issues and munchkin possibilities, I would say is entirely valid and part of why I don't do those things. Some 4e GM's do do those things and claim they can handle them, but I don't play their games or know their play styles well enough to know how they make that work for them exactly. Personally, I think there's a fundamental apples-vs-oranges situation which means that even with as good an attempt as GURPS 4e makes, there just is no way to "balance" apples versus oranges, except in the sense that players get to choose what they do with their points, and are responsible for how effective their choices end up being, and the GM can and should review/approve/deny characters, and is responsible for communicating and not allowing things that won't work well for the GM's desired play style.

Quote from: Skarg;1121263Your fundamental complaint about the effects of handing out 300+ points and letting players do whatever with them will cause weirdness and balance issues and munchkin possibilities, I would say is entirely valid and part of why I don't do those things.

I don't know if 4E actually contains rules to this effect, but what if GURPS did what some other point-build systems do and put more internal limits on the distribution within areas? There used to be a rule in 3E, for example, that you couldn't put more than 2x your character's age into skills; it seems like it should be very easy to put in a rule saying something like, "No more than 50% of your starting character point total can go into any one area of your character -- Attributes, Advantages, Skills, or Powers."

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1121271I don't know if 4E actually contains rules to this effect, but what if GURPS did what some other point-build systems do and put more internal limits on the distribution within areas? There used to be a rule in 3E, for example, that you couldn't put more than 2x your character's age into skills; it seems like it should be very easy to put in a rule saying something like, "No more than 50% of your starting character point total can go into any one area of your character -- Attributes, Advantages, Skills, or Powers."

Yes, there are several different 4e methods that address this in one way or another; things like attribute caps, high skill level maintenance and training times, point buckets, unusual backgrounds as permissions, etc.

Quote from: Omega;1121258That is a nice little falsehood you are spouting there. But its still a falsehood.

I'd say it's a bit more like Pascal's Wager.  It works for pink dinosaurs too.  Or in this case, Palladium, Synibar, AD&D, Traveller or whatever.

Has anyone else looked at V&V Mighty Protectors?  I'm not a fan of everything they did there but they've got a lovely benchmark chart that sets maximums in proportion to total points.

Quote from: Koltar;1121225The Constant so-called 'problem' - people think GURPS needs changes or modifications.

It doesn't, it REALLY doesn't - okay?

If someone is stuck or mired in a D&D mindset  - then they think GURPS needs to be changed.
Maybe your D&D cliches aren't as great as you think they are.

GURPS is Freedom of Choice, D&D is not. Its as simple as that.

- Ed C.

GURPS was made to be changed. It's extremely modular with a ton of moving parts.

I started not to comment here but ----

GURPS doesn't need a lot of house rules. It has a literal fk ton of optional rules based on your group's level of simulation.

You're playing the wrong system.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1121271I don't know if 4E actually contains rules to this effect, but what if GURPS did what some other point-build systems do and put more internal limits on the distribution within areas? There used to be a rule in 3E, for example, that you couldn't put more than 2x your character's age into skills; it seems like it should be very easy to put in a rule saying something like, "No more than 50% of your starting character point total can go into any one area of your character -- Attributes, Advantages, Skills, or Powers."

Yes, quite.

What GURPS 4e mainly does is have many examples of using templates to describe different types of characters and/or professions or whatever, and those often mention ranges of points that would make sense to go into various skills. Max limits are mentioned as something a GM probably wants to do in general though specifics are up to the GM to proscribe, since opinions vary from wanting conservative limits to handing out lots of points and not minding what players do with it. The Basic Set does suggest skills generally probably start getting excessive/unrealistic at about level 25.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1121205This may explain why I'm possibly not grokking your point. My D&D days date back to the veteran AD&D1E ruleset, and we never used any of those houserules, so it doesn't resonate for me the same way. And even when I was playing with GURPS, my game was a Supers game, so I never bothered with maiming criticals because it wasn't part of the atmosphere our group wanted.

It wasn't part of the game I wanted, either. The reason I remember it so vividly is because I hated it. There's a gaming sub-culture out there that loves crits, and it's not insignificant because the the critical hit article that made it into one of the Best of Dragons had a specific note it was one of their most requested articles, and Torn Asunder was one of the most popular third party d20 supplements. I suspect it's most popular among adolescent boys.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1121205I just don't think it's relevant to the point I was making, which is that in practice, players tend to think mostly in terms of the roll right in front of them, so a -1 modifier is going to feel much less significant to a Skill 17 PC than to a Skill 11 PC on a per-roll basis, even if the effects are more accumulatively significant than realized.

If they think of the roll right in front of them, then they'll be looking at the -1 modifier, which is still a -1 modifier whatever it's applied to. Though I do know what you're saying, regardless of the wording. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. I have looked around at studies, and so far there's been universal consensus that humans see things in term of relative values, not absolutes, but I've been having a hard time finding the ones I remember that were focused on probability. A few of the ones I have found list probability as an example of something humans perceive in relative terms, but so far they haven't gone into detail about what they mean.

Quote from: Skarg;1121263I don't much like the 4e change to physical skills flattening at 4 points per point. In earlier editions, 40 points in one Average skill would get +6. Combine this with having the GM approve characters generation and improvement so that putting 40 points in a skill represents a very rare accomplishment, and there's no problem.

That's one of the things that makes point-build character creation difficult to balance across different scales. You end up with certain optimal mixes of skills and stats, meaning that for any particular point build IQ and DX will cluster around a certain level, and so will the levels of your skills. Which means characters like the Hulk will never appear, because after a certain point bumping up DX and spending the points on skills needed to turn him into a combat monster will provide more benefit than another minor incremental increase in strength. I've seen people argue that this is realistic, but it's really not. It's gamist.

I never played HERO, but as I understand they have an interesting approach: There's a cap on the total power plus the total skill of an attack, so you can choose to be really powerful, or really accurate, but not both.

Quote from: Koltar;1120351...and that right there IS the problem.

Every version pf "D&D" is kind of condescending and forces you into 'classes - GURPS does not.
The GURPS style credits the reader or gamer with intelligence and the ability to make choices.

You might say that GURPS is very 'pro-choice' - but you have to make a choice

-Ed C.

Sorry, I was using design the way printers/artists do. I should have said "layout."

As far as classes vs. point-based go, I prefer point-based, but classes make a lot of sense; probably more sense than point-based. People (i.e., characters) generally make choices in bundles. They may like to think they're special snowflakes, max agency in all things, but in reality they take their beliefs, for example, in bundles. If a person believes x, he also has a strong tendency to believe y and z, while the next guy believes a, and has a strong tendency to believe b and c.

Classes kinda reflect reality better. That said, they're kind of a straitjacket, too. Best of both worlds is a point-based system with a healthy selection of classes, kits, backgrounds, etc., for sale.